


In which Gil tries

by Overlord_Bethany



Series: Always Send Knives [5]
Category: Girl Genius (Webcomic)
Genre: Gen, I will explain the Cartography thing I swear, Paris hijinks, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-10
Updated: 2018-08-10
Packaged: 2019-06-24 16:46:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15634713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Overlord_Bethany/pseuds/Overlord_Bethany
Summary: You can guess about how that goes.





	In which Gil tries

Gil slumped over the bar, his head on his arms, groaning quietly into the crook of his elbow. How had he managed to make such a mess so quickly? He had only wanted to sit with Colette and Tarvek. Instead, he had picked a fight with Tarvek, and he still had no idea why that had happened.

To make up for his gaffe, Gil had arrived early to meet them at L'Endroit Habituel, but he had given himself enough time to regret everything. He moped, and he waited for the others to arrive. When they did, how would he ever manage a successful apology?

“You should have just sent knives.”

Bangladesh Dupree stood a short distance away, polishing a clean glass. Gil frowned at her. “What are you doing behind the bar?”

“Hot bartender, free booze” Dupree said with a dismissive shrug. Gil glanced up and down the bar. Which bartender did she mean? Or was she talking about herself?

“Nice knives,” Dupree continued. “Force-welded steel. Silver filigree. It looks like he’s a sucker for fancy things.”

“I am _not_ taking advice from you.”

Dupree made a rude noise. “Suit yourself.” She drifted on down the bar, where she poured a drink and overcharged for it.

Gil surveyed the room. Students gathered in clusters, some grouped by age, some by more obscure criteria. Some faces were familiar already. Some he had yet to learn. Up on the little stage, a trio sang some old song about a beast in the forest, and Gil smiled. He remembered Tiffy complaining about all the sequins on their costumes.

The door swung open, and a hush filled the room. Gil knew without looking that Colette had arrived. He twisted in his seat, and his stomach clenched. Tarvek and Colette walked arm in arm, their heads bent close together, laughing about something. Gil frowned at himself. Why should he resent the two of them having fun?

Dupree set a glass, a spoon, and a sugar cube on the bar. “ _Knives_ ,” she whispered before she turned away to retrieve a bottle of absinthe.

Wooster dropped into the seat beside him. “You like that awful stuff?”

Did he? Gil only just suppressed a shrug. His gaze followed Tarvek and Colette as they threaded their way through the crowd. Colette steered them toward him, and it almost looked like she dragged Tarvek the last few steps toward the bar. Dupree returned with the absinthe at just that moment, and Colette ordered something called a Blue Blasphemy. Dupree tossed her a wink and started pulling down suspicious-looking bottles.

Tarvek settled on the other side of Colette, but he peered down the bar with a judgmental eye. “How can you drink that stuff?” he said, unconsciously echoing Wooster’s sentiment. Gil stiffened in his seat.

“Knives,” Dupree whispered again. She twirled a skull-shaped bottle, and poured some of its contents into a glass, followed by a few drops of something blue-black, and some ice cubes that smoked faintly. Colette opened her mouth to ask about the knives, but Dupree leaned across the bar and gave her a slow smile. “For _you_ , my heart’s desire, it’s on the house.”

Colette blushed, but she maintained eye contact as she withdrew money from her pocket and dropped it on the bar. Grinning, Dupree snatched up the cash and bounced away.

“Um,” Gil said in an undertone, “you know that that was—”

“Shush,” Colette interrupted. Before Gil could smart too much from her sharp tone, he saw her eyes dancing across the top of her drink. “I know flirting when I see it.”

“Flirting?” Gil repeated. “I meant that—” A sharp kick to his ankle silenced him. So keeping his arrangement with the Master of Paris meant keeping Dupree a secret as well. Fair enough. Probably only Wulfenbachs would want to claim responsibility for someone like her.

Gil caught Wooster watching him through narrowed eyes. So his conversation with Colette had drawn unwanted attention. He would have to take care not to do that in the future. For now, perhaps he could create a distraction more memorable than a couple of half-finished sentences.

He seized the absinthe he had not ordered and he drank it all.

“Ew,” said Wooster.

“Good heavens,” agreed Tarvek.

It wasn’t actually that bad. It had a strong licorice taste, which Gil admitted would put some people off, but Theo had made worse for him. With alarming regularity. He smiled around at their little company. “What? I like it.”

When had he ever felt a need to prove himself to Tarvek?

He had little time to dwell on the question, for the front door burst open and a Clank with altogether too many limbs trundled in. Gil leapt to his feet, ready for action, only to see the other students mostly ignoring it. A few made dismissive gestures. One table began booing and throwing wadded napkins.

The machine wobbled and shuddered. Slowly, it turned toward the table full of jeering students. Then it opened a hatch that resembled jaws, and it emitted what Gil termed an unreasonable amount of spiders.

Tarvek let out a shriek and tried to climb on top of his chair. In an instant, Dupree had appeared at Gil’s back.

“That is the best noise I’ve ever heard!” she crowed, her voice nearly lost in the shouts of scattering students. “When you humiliate yourself failing at apologizing to that guy, can I have him?”

The spiders swarmed out from the machine. One collided with a table leg, and it exploded.

“That is _not_ acceptable!” Tarvek howled. Gil felt inclined to agree.

As the students scattered, Gil cast about for potential weapons. How could he contain the spiders? Could he minimize the damage they did? More tiny explosions spurred him to action, and he leapt into the fray. He upended a table, making a barricade between the spiders and a handful of fleeing students. One of them struggled to unfold a pneumatic crutch. As Gil turned to help, a mechanical leg smashed through the table, sending them both sprawling.

The student beneath Gil _squished_.

Gil recoiled in mingled horror and fascination. “What—?” A crash and a cluster of explosions stopped the words in his throat. At Dupree’s triumphant cackle, he whirled to see shattered glass and blue flames in the midst of the spider swarm. Behind the bar, Dupree stuffed a rag down the neck of another bottle of liquor.

“Stop that!” he yelped. “You’re going to burn down the whole block!” Which Dupree would probably consider a rousing victory.

“Not likely.” Another student had appeared to help Gil drag the first one clear of the rubble. He wore two pairs of goggles, a grapple gun on each wrist, and a bandolier of notebooks across his chest. “You seem stout of heart. Want to—”

Colette seized the oddly dressed student and hauled him away from Gil. “He’s not joining the Cartography Club! Now off with you!”

The fallen student wheezed with laughter. Gil tried to prop him upright, but he felt wobbly in all the wrong places. “What’s wrong with joining the Cartography Club?” Gil asked him in an undertone. Behind them, another crash and more explosions signaled that Dupree had ignored him.

“Aren’t you in Multi-Phyla Monstrosities with me? How do you not know about the—No, no, I see that’s the wrong question. How’d you get into MPM without taking the prerequisites?”

“Oh.” The question caught Gil off guard, and he answered honestly. “I built a warm blooded crustacean a few years ago.”

Colette smacked his arm.

“So you’re the new genius biologist, then?”

“Can we focus?” Colette demanded.

His eyes glittering with some unnamed hunger, the other student offered his hand. “I’m Warwick.”

Gil hesitated for a moment before shaking Warwick’s hand. Two out of five digits felt oddly flexible. “Why are you squishy?” he blurted before he could stop himself. Colette smacked him again.

Two more crashes and a cluster of explosions alerted him to the growing conflagration behind him. One of the tables had caught fire, which seemed to baffle the Clank. It reared back, its front legs windmilling in the air.

“Nice one!” crowed Dupree. Gil glanced toward her, only to see that Wooster and Tarvek had joined her in lobbing improvised firebombs into the midst of the spiders. Tarvek stood on the bar, a bottle in his hand, a wild look blazing in his eyes.

“Here.” Warwick pressed his crutch into Gil’s hands. “If you turn the pressure settings all the way up and find a suitable projectile—”

“You’re walking around with a cannon?” Gil eyed Warwick with new respect. His classmate gave a self conscious shrug.

“I think ‘walking’ is a bit generous to say. But I’m working on it.”

Gil had already set to work on the crutch, boosting its pressure output by another thirty percent. Colette handed him a broken table leg and dragged Warwick away from him. Gil loaded his improvised weapon, and he took aim.

The kick from the pneumatic cannon bruised his shoulder, but his bolt flew true. The table leg speared right through the command module. The Clank shuddered, listed, then collapsed right atop a dozen spiders. A dozen small explosions pulverized its underside.

“Yes!” Gil leapt up and pumped his fist in the air. No one had told him that higher education would involve makeshift harpoon guns. Grinning, he turned to hand the pneumatic crutch back to Warwick. “Thanks. You’re remarkably well prepared.” _But why are you squishy?_ Before he could ask again, three more bottles crashed down behind him, engulfing the remaining spiders in flame. “We have to put out the fire!” he yelped instead.

“Relax,” Colette said. “The floor is flame retardant.”

Gil looked around at the ruined furniture, the flames burning low beneath the debris. Was this why Tarvek had called this place kind of a dive? Speaking of which…

Tarvek jumped down from the bar and dusted his hands off. Flush with victory, Gil strutted over to apologize for his childhood transgressions. Tarvek looked at him and lifted his chin a little. Was that determination? Gil studied him, and he saw that Tarvek’s breath hitched a little, and his gaze wavered.

Gil cleared his throat.

“So…” _I’m sorry about what happened when we were kids_. The words seemed stuck, stubbornly refusing to move past his larynx. Why? It shouldn’t embarrass him to admit that he had been young and clueless, that he had hurt Tarvek without realizing the full implications of his own actions. “So… you don’t like spiders, huh?”

Dammit.

“Not even a little bit.” Tarvek scuffed the sole of one shoe on the floor, and he broke eye contact. “What about you?”

“Spiders should not explode,” Gil declared with authority, and Tarvek grinned. Gil’s heart made a strange sideways stab. What could he do to replicate the effect? Tarvek needed to smile like that all the time.

“GIL!”

Abruptly, the singers and the stagehands swarmed him, bearing him up against the bar, all clamoring to buy him drinks in celebration. He cast about, reaching to bring Tarvek with him, but he missed. Tarvek backed away, his smile descending into a scowl, his shoulders tensing. Dupree’s laugh cut through the commotion, and Gil surrendered.

He would have time to apologize later.


End file.
